ABSTRACT
The Singapore Arts Festival (SAF) is Singapore's flagship annual arts event. It began in 1977 as a small-scale enterprise that provided local theatre practitioners with an opportunity to practice their craft. The National Arts Council of Singapore (NAC) runs the event, with the festival's curatorial direction determined by a Steering Committee where the NAC is strongly represented. Through Festival Director Goh Ching Lee, the SAF epitomized the "image maker" potential of the arts, branding Singapore as an international cultural hub by programming and commissioning high-profile performances, particularly from Europe and North America. This chapter develops existing analyses of the SAF by focusing on the period after Goh's tenure. Glocalisation often invokes a happy melding of global and local spaces, with local specificity retained or adapted through transnational forces. As a process, glocalisation therefore counters the idea that globalisation is a singular or totalising force.
